Why Modern Dating Has to Change
This post was published on June 6, 2017 on my old blog, samplesizedwriting.wordpress.com
Guess who hasn't posted for an entire month again?! Yup it's me! Sorry about that, but my last post was a bit of a doozy for me to write (and so many people read and liked it?? Glad the post that made me want to vomit as I wrote it was so popular), and then I got caught up with my last weeks of my freshman year (!!) of college and studying for finals and saying goodbye to my Syracuse people for months (and to one for quite a few months). So, this blog once again fell to the wayside. But to be fair, I also, once again, wasn't sure what to write about. Well, here I am with something to say! And it's about dating.
Now I have read quite a lot of articles and blog posts about how the modern dating scene is messy and full of gray areas and I have only started wholeheartedly agreeing with them in the last six-ish months as prior to that I was only accustomed to proper relationships full of actual, (mostly) honest communication. Well, once I got into dating apps and going out with new guys I realized just how true all those articles and posts were.
For some reason clear boundaries and straightforward, honest communication is mostly nonexistent. Everything is just "hanging out" and you could be actively dating only one person for months and have met friends and relatives and still just be "seeing them." What's a label? Because I don't think they exist anymore. You aren't a girlfriend because that's just too much of a commitment, but "just friends" is not an appropriate label either, so any and all introductions are awkward. Let me tell you, being asked if you're a guy's girlfriend and both of you having to awkwardly laugh and say no is not fun. It's especially not fun when it happens multiple times. (However, it is fun when someone turns around and asks, "Well, why not? She's pretty! What, are you just too good for her or something?! Psh.") It's even worse when you sort of really want the label, but you know that the situation is complicated and you're too much of a baby when it comes to confrontation and too afraid to mess up the delicate thing you have with the person to actually ask for it.
I don't mean to pin this all on guys either, because it's not just their faults. Us girls are guilty too! When the guys I've gone on dates with asked what I was looking for relationship-wise, I was always "not sure, just trying this out and seeing where it goes." I hate the words "seeing where it goes" now, because every time I've said it it hadn't really went anywhere except to an incredibly awkward place where we were doing things like a real couple but weren't a real couple. And it's not like I didn't have conversations to try and sort things out, but somehow I ended up saying that the "situationship" was all good and I didn't mind not having labels. Why? I don't really know. I probably just didn't want to rock the boat and mess things up, because at least being in a situationship was better than being totally single.
The worst part, though, is that you experience all the emotional highs and lows of a proper relationship without any real validation for your feelings because you aren't in a proper relationship. So when those lows come and hurt bad, you're left feeling like you shouldn't even feel bad because you aren't really his girlfriend. It's really just a mess.
A side effect of this current dating phenomenon that's affected me is the fact that nobody feels permanent, and since nobody feels permanent I don't feel like I can really, truly let anybody in. I love getting to know people on a deeper level, and I love when people get to know me. But I simply don't feel like I can allow guys I've been seeing get to know me very well, nor do I take great strides to get to know them extremely well, because I don't feel like they'll be sticking around. Like, what is the point of a guy learning about really personal stories from my past or about my friends from home or a lot about my family if all of it will come to nothing anyways? There's no guarantee I'll even have him tomorrow, so why should I allow myself to get invested and open up to him? I absolutely hate being so guarded, because I want guys that I care about to know me super well, but like, I also want to know that guys I care about also care about me. I don't really know that in this dating culture, which is why no guy feels permanent and why I've put up a fair amount of walls.
Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why do we try to lock our emotions away somewhere? Why are we afraid to commit? What is so scary about saying, "I like you a lot, will you be my girlfriend/boyfriend," especially when you already do things couples do? Why are labels so taboo? Maybe gray areas feel more comfortable in theory, but in reality they are confusing and just end up a painful mess of the same emotions we were scared of owning up to by slapping a label on things.
I know that there is a bit of an extra weight tacked onto making a relationship official. I know there are some additional expectations and sometimes things really are situationally complicated (having been in an especially situationally complicated relationship-thing myself). But damn, both parties need to have the guts to sort out their own feelings. If you care about someone romantically and enjoy spending time with them and are attracted to them, then for the love of God make things official and jump out of the gray area. DIVE out of it! Save yourselves! And if one or all of those things do not apply to you, then let them GO. It's unfair to you and them, and you both deserve to find people who will make you truly happy.
Young adulthood and life in general is complicated enough, and all we're doing is making it harder on ourselves and others by getting into romantic situations that are incredibly unclear. Set boundaries, define things, and just make life easier because relationships are already hard and all we're doing is making them harder.